Matt Gerson's "Angle on Movies"

The People vs. Larry Flynt

I can't even comment on this one. Just read it as Matt wrote it, with an open thesaurus in front of you.
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I'm Matt Gerson with alas! four reluctant Angles out of five, because of the cause of the movie, not the characters of the movie, for The People vs. Larry Flynt, a sullied walk through the lowest of the low, who both demeans and somehow upholds in a left-handed way for millions of men better than he for a great cause of the First Amendment, depraved and flung down into his dirt, and yet, as any great circus, we're always entertained with that Master of Bulldung, throwing his oranges at judges and peddling his cynical double-talk, a mass of molten arrogant mocking the system, rocking and rolling us with his quality of a lunatic taking over the asylum and not so strangely directed by Milos Forman, of victim of totalitarianism and One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest fame, to whom the First Amendment is a holy writ as corporate boardrooms are run by a porn lower depths foul mouthed cretin Larry Flynn [sic], and porno runs wild and political figures like even the Reverend Jerry Falwell have to watch their backsides for a swift kick in their reputation's rear end, run with a license to lie insensitivity and quite often sheer hilarious outrage by a merchant of sleaze, literally, for the sheer energy and exploitation from the morals of the sewer up by the true hustler in The People vs. Larry Flynt.

Courtney Love, the punk rock singer and Woody Harrelson of Cheers co-star as the go-go dancer stripper with delicious lips and a body made for loving and morals fit for the newest empire built on the naked edge of outrage of sex by cartoon characters, animals, you name it, and, of course, Woody is Larry Flynt himself.

Their empire of bad taste, based on Hustler, which had in each and every page, copulating everythings, is presented by these two glossy characters of sleaze, Larry Flynt and Althea Leasure, both of whom show it all and have no qualms about doing the Horizontal Mambo with the Kama Sutra of sex with any sex, at least in Althea's world.

Larry confines himself to banging babes each action-packed day, debasing the high and mighty is the ultimate turn-on for him every day at the office.

The downward, ever more downward into uncharted realms of sin chronicle, which goes through Flynt's moonshine antics as a child, braining his lowlife father for stealing his secret lode of moonshine, to using all his girl strippers for private pleasure in an Ohio dive bar, to the beginning of the Hustler magazine world, that takes toilet sex and figures in the public eye and drags them down to four-letter sexually gross to the max world of Larry Flynt and Hustler.

It's a ride, and an "E" ticket for the soul, sullied by the W. C. Fields of lechery instead of booze, good old boy Larry Flynt.

Why give this movie four Angles, you ask?

The courtroom scenes, specifically the one filmed at a replica of the Supreme Court, with a Mother Teresa and Christ-like attorney, who surely has to be overlooking all the immediate sleaze and mocking of all decency by his infant-like client, Edward Norton from Primal Fear, playing Larry's lawyer Isaacson, arguing a case of the First Amendment that is powerful and riveting and alone puts into perspective of political free speech the incredibly ridiculous statement that Jerry Falwell had "intimate knowledge," shall we say, of his own mother.

This landmark case, thrown into the Supreme Court, Falwell vs. Flynt, which works its way up the court docket, is the saving grace of what otherwise is nonstop parades of foul, moral-less, slimy machinations of an atheistic man who mocks all human society in the name of gratifying his own ego, sitting like a judge and gigolo in his plush, incredibly rich, curiously tasteful offices of Flyntcorp, and scheming to screw up the famous and bring them down to his level, using the First Amendment as a mere tool in his whim-ish outrages, like the Falwell incident, meeting Ruth Carter, the evangelist and president's sister and using her, putting him into fervor for Jesus, to turn crucifixes into sexual implements of his tawdry case in copulating.

Only sure Oscar nominee for Best Supporting Actress and princess of outrage in showing off a body that won't quit, Courtney Love, as Althea, and the noble efforts of his lawyer to sustain a First Amendment sullied and mud-driven but essentially upheld by the big court, Edward Norton, occasionally raise Larry Flynt's tawdry tale an inch or two above the primeval savage muck of his outlook and hedonistic gang-bang values spilled across Hustler, yet The People vs. Larry Flynt is an object lesson on how the worst of us can bring out issues like the public figures fair game one that separate America from, say, Iraq or Saudi Arabia or North Korea.

We must uphold the loathsome creatures like Flynt, for our own freedom is always at peril from Big Brother, for law enforcement has become law license to get anyone who isn't popular with the powers that be.

I'm Matt Gerson with four out of five Angles for The People vs. Larry Flynt

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